Media Spin on Fort Hood: Catching Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at the Office

An observant Muslim with an apparent history of support for suicide bombing shoots up an American Army base. Think you can guess his motives?

If you said religion or politics, you’re not a member of the conventional media. In the first 24 hours after the shooting, media reports portrayed suspect Nidal Hasan not as an angry Islamic extremist but as a victim, both of post-traumatic stress disorder and more broadly of American foreign policy.

In a piece posted at Truelsant.com, psychologist Todd Essig claims that Hasan was “wounded by war…. before he first pulled a trigger.”  Mental health professionals, he writes, can be victims of “vicarious traumatization,” a disorder that can prove “contagious and deadly.” Keep in mind that Hasan was never deployed to a war zone. Apparently he caught it at the office.

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